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Book Review: Stirring It Up: How to Make Money and Save the World by Gary Hirshberg Published by Hyperion Books, $24.95 Available at RiverRun Bookstore 603 431-2100

How does a guy with half a dozen cows become the CEO of a $300 million yogurt company? The answer is actually a simple tenet of the business world:  be half a step ahead of everyone else. Twenty-five years ago Stonyfield Farm began making yogurt with an eye toward bringing good healthy food to people while being environmentally friendly.

Gary Hirshberg is half a step ahead of everyone else not because he realized that being green was good for the planet, but because he realized that being green was profitable, and was going to become more profitable as the planet began to run out of fossil fuels.  Local boy makes good!!

Stirring It Up is subtitled How to Make Money and Save the World, and the book shows how each new environmental improvement that Stonyfield makes to its Londonderry, N.H., facility has not only reduced its carbon footprint, but has also increased its profit. It also highlights other companies in America that are making similar advances in sustainable business practices.

With the book market being flooded with books about sustainability, Hirshberg stands out with his practical approach and his real experience. As a small business owner, I am a great proponent of buying from local, independent businesses, and would be perfectly happy if all the national chains disappeared, but Gary is using his experience as the head of an extremely successful company to engage the management of huge corporations like Walmart and convince them that sustainable business practices are the key to the future. 

As he says, “Business got us into this environmental mess, and it will be business that will get us out.” 

To that end, he urges readers to be more conscious of their buying practices. I recently heard him speak here in Portsmouth, and he ended by pointing out that big business spends a lot of money trying to figure out what the American consumer wants—how big, what color, what ingredients. Every time we buy something, we are casting a vote, and we can use that vote to reward companies that care for the earth.

That’s a much-needed reminder of something we should already know.